We all wanted to believe in the campaign, and many of us signed up to it. The bitter truth is, however, that for Richard Burton, Hernando de Soto, Livingstone and many more of the romantic characters represented in the book, their justification remained strictly scientific, imperial or financial. Exploration, the message seems to be, belongs in the cosy world of yesteryear.Īnd thus we return to my central question: what, actually, is the point of the modern-day explorer? The very same was asked not long ago at the Royal Geographical Society, which now prefers to encourage hard-edged research rather than the glorious expeditioning of past times.īelieving the august body to have lost its way, Robin Hanbury-Tenison mentored the Beagle Campaign, a lobbying group which aimed to put the RGS right.

It's a glorious, but visually rather cramped, nostalgia-fest that makes even recent figures such as Jacques Cousteau appear from an era long gone. It's the type you curl up in the chair with. Which is ironic, because this book in all three regards is exactly the opposite. Rather too keen on the manly art of sledge-hauling certainly, but what is exploration if not discovery, and what person better expressed the struggle and sacrifice of the pioneer? Instead, we must be satisfied with Amundsen – effective, clinical, intellectually modern. This will be a shocker for many readers, especially those who recall that, though he made a hash of claiming the south pole, Scott had a greater scientific programme than Amundsen. There were also notable absences: no Captain Scott. There were surprises (the illustrator Thomas Baines and the desert motorist Ralph A Bagnold), and these enriched the whole. These were my gloomy reflections as I opened The Great Explorers, a collection of biographical essays on many of the great names from past to present – Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amundsen, each according to their terrain. And for what purpose? We strut and fret, showing ourselves off upon the world stage while that stage burns. Yet our public schools still churn them out, these explorer types – I suppose I mean types like me. No, the type who calls himself an 'explorer' today is, when you come to think about it, as likely as not a sort of middle-class vainglorious athlete he's a dilettante, but with communication skills, the fortitude possessed by any half-decent soldier, and a flair for self publicity – while the real business of discovery is being done by the boffin scratching at a rock sample or staring into an electron microscope. Worse, they might be a distraction – I'm thinking of the antics of the adventurers you see dumbed down on the telly. But from the point of view of our dear old abused and shrunken planet, they do now seem entirely unnecessary. I daresay that, even in the 21st century, there are explorers who serve a useful function – Pen Hadow comes to mind, leading scientists across the Arctic.

Land of Eagles by Robin Hanbury-Tenison